Just a quick update on efforts to change my Live ID email address. I'd already managed to create a new address within Live.com. As if to confirm it, I'd been offered to "Start using your new alias:
xxxx@live.no" (where "xxxx" stands in for my name, and ".no" stands for Norway where I'm holed up).
Now, the next step is to actually change the email address of my Microsoft Account. After navigating to the Overview part of Account page, I click on "
Rename account".
There are two options here. Create a new email address / Use a different address. I choose the second option because I want to use
xxxx@live.no.
This results in the following notice: "You can't use @live.no in your Microsoft account email address. Please try a different email address."
To cut a long story short, after trying umpteen times and approaches to solve the problem, I did a bit of Googling yesterday. The problem has been aired on the Microsoft Community forum. Here's a snippet of the official explanation (to which about 350 people have responded):
We have discovered that a small percentage of users experienced problems accessing some of their email messages after they renamed their account. As a result of that investigation, we have taken two actions:
- We first turned off the “rename” functionality to investigate any negative issues resulting from renames.
- We have fixed many user accounts that were renamed and experienced issues accessing some of their email.
We are still actively working to resolve all issues associated with account rename and apologize for the delay. The rename option will be activated when we are confident that no further issues will arise.
Here's the web address for that conversation:
Why can't I change my Microsoft account email? - Microsoft Community
There's another discussion here:
Why can’t I change my Microsoft Account email? | trekker.net
So as a last resort I went back and clicked on "create a new address". You're given four options: @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @hotmail.no and @live.no.
I can't use @live.no because it's already taken - by me. I try
xxxx@hotmail.no. That works (amazingly!). I then deleted my xxxx.live.no address, went back to the "rename account page and created a new address for my Live ID, xxxx.live.no. That worked too.
I don't know what the moral of all this is, but I'm sure there is one.